At a Glance
Lula, the Delta, and the Economy That Was Designed to Keep Her Poor
Unita Blackwell grew up in the Mississippi Delta's sharecropper economy — the system that had replaced formal slavery as the mechanism for extracting agricultural labour from Black workers under conditions of near-total economic dependency. She was born in Lula in Coahoma County in 1933, the same county that would later be home to some of SNCC's most important organising work, and she grew up moving with her family as sharecropper families moved — following the cotton harvest, living in plantation housing, attending whatever schooling was available in the communities where the cotton needed picking.
The specific formation this produced was one of direct, embodied understanding of what the racial order was as an economic system. She was not learning about plantation capitalism from a textbook; she was living inside it, experiencing its mechanisms of control and dependency in the most direct possible way. The plantation owner's housing was leverage over the sharecropper's behaviour; the plantation owner's credit was leverage over the sharecropper's purchasing; the plantation owner's word to the employer in the next county was leverage over the sharecropper's future employment. Every dimension of the sharecropper's material life was a point of control that the plantation economy had designed to prevent the accumulation of economic independence that might eventually produce political independence.
Her move to Issaquena County placed her in one of the state's smallest and most heavily Black counties — a county where the political potential of Black majority demographics had never been realised because the voter registration apparatus had been as effective as the economic apparatus in maintaining white political control. When SNCC's voter registration campaign reached Issaquena County in 1964, Blackwell was thirty-one years old and had spent her entire adult life inside the economic system that the voter registration campaign was challenging. She went to the courthouse to register on the same day SNCC was organising the trip.
The Eviction and Its Consequences
The plantation owner's eviction of Blackwell on the day she tried to register to vote was intended as a demonstration and a warning — a demonstration that the economic consequences of civil rights activity were immediate and severe, and a warning to every other sharecropper on the plantation and in the county that the same consequences awaited anyone who followed her example. The plantation system had been using eviction as a political tool for as long as there had been sharecroppers to evict, and the specific speed of this eviction — she had gotten home to find the ultimatum already waiting — was meant to communicate the comprehensiveness of the surveillance and the swiftness of the retaliation.
The eviction accomplished the opposite of what was intended. By removing Blackwell from the plantation housing that was the primary mechanism of her economic dependency, it also removed the primary mechanism of her political control. She had nothing left to lose in the specific sense that the plantation system's leverage over her behaviour depended on: she had no housing to lose because she had already lost it, no employment to lose because she had already been fired, no tenant relationship to lose because she had already been evicted. The eviction was supposed to destroy her capacity for civil rights activity; instead it freed her to pursue it.
The clarity of this dynamic — the way in which the plantation system's primary tool of control became, when used too early and too completely, the instrument of the person's liberation from that control — was not unique to Blackwell's case. Fannie Lou Hamer had been evicted from the Marlow plantation for the same reason and with the same effect. The plantation economy's confidence in eviction as the definitive political tool was a confidence that the civil rights movement exposed as a limited one: eviction removed people from the system's control, and people removed from the system's control were free to organise against it.
From Eviction to Election: Mayor of Mayersville
The arc from Blackwell's 1964 eviction to her 1976 election as mayor of Mayersville is one of the civil rights movement's most complete demonstrations of what the Voting Rights Act was supposed to produce. She had been evicted for trying to register to vote; twelve years later she was elected to govern the county seat. The transformation was not merely personal — she had become an effective organiser, had filed a school desegregation lawsuit, had built the community relationships that electoral success required — but structural: the Voting Rights Act had changed the conditions that made her election possible, and those changed conditions were the direct product of the movement she had joined on the day she was evicted.
Her twenty-five-year tenure as mayor of Mayersville — a small town of fewer than five hundred people — was not a stepping stone to higher office but a sustained commitment to governing a specific community in ways that the community's needs required. She built roads, brought water and sewer systems to communities that had never had them, accessed federal funding for housing and community development, and did the unglamorous practical work of local government that the civil rights movement's legislative victories had made possible for Black communities that had previously been excluded from the governance of their own towns.
Her simultaneous service as president of the National Conference of Black Mayors for twenty years was the larger-scale expression of the same commitment: building the infrastructure of Black political power across the country, connecting Black mayors from small rural communities to major urban centres, coordinating their advocacy and their access to federal resources, and demonstrating that the election of Black officials was not the end of the movement's work but the beginning of the harder, less dramatic work of governing in the interest of the people the movement had been fighting for.
The MacArthur Fellowship, the Master's Degree, and the Recognition
The MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that Blackwell received in 1992 — the Genius Grant that provides unrestricted financial support to people of extraordinary creativity and promise — was one of the more unexpected forms of formal recognition that the civil rights movement's veterans received. She was a sharecropper's daughter from Lula, Mississippi, who had been evicted for trying to vote, who had organised voter registration in Issaquena County in conditions of constant threat, who was governing a small Mississippi Delta town. The MacArthur committee's decision to award her the fellowship was a recognition that this combination of experiences and capabilities represented something that deserved unrestricted support and the specific form of legitimation that a major national foundation's recognition provides.
Her master's degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which she earned in 1983 — fifty years after her birth and nineteen years after the eviction — was another form of the same larger arc: the sharecropper's daughter completing the graduate education that the plantation economy had been designed to prevent her from ever accessing. The specific symbolism of a sharecropper's daughter from a Mississippi plantation earning a graduate degree was not lost on Blackwell, who wrote about the experience in her memoir with the same directness she brought to everything else in her life.
She died in May 2019, at eighty-six years old, in Greenville, Mississippi — in the Delta that had been the scene of the eviction that had started everything and the organising that had followed it. She had spent fifty-five years turning the specific injustice of that eviction into a demonstration of what was possible when the conditions that made the injustice possible were changed. The demonstration was not complete — Issaquena County and the Mississippi Delta remained poor, remained underserved, remained distant from the economic justice that the movement had always identified as the necessary companion to political rights. But the first Black woman mayor in Mississippi had been elected, had served for twenty-five years, had built roads and brought water to communities that had gone without, and had died in the state where she had been born as an elder of a movement that had changed more than it had been given credit for changing.